


Character Interview

by She5los



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Heavy in Your Arms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 15:53:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/980798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/She5los/pseuds/She5los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Feferi is asked to be a character reference for Eridan before he's promoted.  Takes place in the "Heavy in Your Arms" AU by SpoonerizeSwiftness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Character Interview

You want to know how reliable he is? Well, I could tell you he’s infinitely reliable, but how much time do we have?

Okay. Then you get the long version.

What’s your blood color? …No, I promise it’s important. Okay. So, being a lime-blood, have you ever been to the purple slums?

That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. I wouldn’t want to go there, either. I just never had a choice about it.

I think, though, that it’s important to give you a little background, to tell you where most coldbloods, especially seadwellers, are coming from.

I grew up in an apartment with six other people. Luluna and Martis were five and they were pale, usually, and they took in kids without lusii. I never met my lusus. I guess it’s an aquatic. Our group was lucky, though; we had a mattress. During the day, we would all lie on it sideways, and as everyone got older, our feet would dangle off the side. A lot of people say they grew up poor. I grew up with nothing. Sharing sopor patches so we could stretch our caegars. We kids, we would scavenge. Ariast would come home and say, “the dumpsters were good today!” and we would have soup made from other people’s scraps.

I’m telling you this because it’s important to know where we came from. Eridan’s life was the same as a kid. His apartment was a little bigger, but he lived with seven people.

We met because we were in the same gang. I think there’s a tendency, outside the slums, to think of gangs as these violent entities that fuck people up and make people turn to illegal jobs, but when you’re there, it’s hard to survive without one. I had one hat, a knit cap, and I wore it even in summer to hide the tape over my fins. I only found a job because my gang hooked me up, and I borrowed my roommates’ clothes so I could look half-presentable when I went to the interview. Sitting there in summer in mismatched clothes with no patches on the front and a warm hat. But I got the job. It was gutting fish. Do you know what a slap in the face that is? Cutting up fish that I should have been hunting in the ocean and taking out all the nasty bits because the people with money to spend don’t like them. I never had money for fish. When we got a windfall, we would get odds and ends of grub meat and boil the hell out of them because you can’t eat grub legs, but you can share the broth.

The factory smelled like death. I guess, to warm-bloods, it would smell like fish, but I’m aquatic and it smelled like death.

I guess that was kind of a tangent. But I want you to understand how hard a worker Eridan is. Seadwellers don’t keep work unless they work hard, but he was tireless. And I don’t mean working hard the way you do when you have money, where you go in and do your job and it’s kind of monotonous. I mean going into work and you haven’t slept well because you roommate was throwing up half the night and all you had to comfort you was half a patch of half-rotten sopor, and you haven’t had a solid meal that you can remember, and only three of the seven of you have jobs, and you respond too slowly to your supervisor and you’re fired. It happens so quickly. But Eridan was always on top of things. He held onto jobs better than anyone I know, and it’s awful and prideless to hold a job when you’re a cold-blood, so I really respect him for it. He was the model seadweller: hardworking, upstanding, always had his ears taped… And our gang threw a big dance and we started talking and we were, like, immediately pale, you know? Fated.

We moved in together that autumn. We met in early Spring. Both of us had jobs, so we got this tiny apartment, but it felt so big because it was only the two of us. It was so good to come home from a day of lopping off fish heads and be with him. With both our incomes, the sopor didn’t get any better, but we could use a full patch. I thought to myself that it felt so very restful.

That winter – we’d known each other for less than a sweep, remember – I lost my job. I was beat up on my way to work and my coat was stolen, so I showed up, late and freezing my ass off, with a black eye and my supervisor said she couldn’t tolerate that kind of laziness from her staff and if I was going to be such a troublemaker and get into fights, I should turn in my knife and leave. I cried all day because I knew what that meant. When you’re rich and you’re fired, you start thinking about where you can look for another job. When you’re poor and you’re fired, your head starts buzzing with all the calculations, all the things you can cut back on and all the things you know you can’t. And I had just lost my coat. My blood is cold, but I wasn’t made for sub-zero temperatures. When Eridan got home, I was so ashamed. I watched his face fall when I told him I’d lost my job, but he just comforted me, like a good moirail, and told me we’d get through it. People always find a way.

I asked all my connections if there were any openings. I applied to things as often as I could, but “blood color” is a standard category on employment forms and people don’t even know what to do with fuchsia. It reminds them of the old empress.

I didn’t get a job that winter, but I was out all the time, scavenging, and I still didn’t have a coat, and Eridan always told me not to stretch myself, that he’d do that, but he had a job as a janitor and his work was so hard and I didn’t want to be a leech. So of course I got sick.

I think being sick when you don’t have a good place to get medicine is the worst. Our doctor also dealt in illegal drugs, if you had the money. By the time we had the cash to pay for medicine, I was in a really bad way. Eridan gave me his coat when we went there, but I was in fever-chills. I couldn’t even walk on my own. I wasn’t eating and his persistence was the only reason I stayed hydrated. The pills made things easier, but it took me a long time to get better. He thinks I didn’t know some of the sacrifices he made for me. That he cut himself down to a half-patch of sopor while I stayed on a full one. That he gave me fresh food from the market while he ate other people’s trash. He was working the midday shift and taking care of me at night and he was so exhausted and we were both starving, but he just kept going. That’s being a hard worker. That’s loyalty and determination and grit, and if those aren’t things an officer needs, I don’t know what are.

When I got better, I looked for jobs again. I found one for a few weeks in the spring, but it ended midsummer. He got a job at the palace. You know his record there: he would work himself too long and too hard and at all hours of the day so that he would have a good paycheck to bring home. He never stopped being a good moirail; he would come home after forty-eight hours on-duty and he would throw his arms around me and ask how I was. He would get his paycheck after working too long and too hard and bring home a half-caegar’s worth of fresh fish, and that was a luxury I’d never had in my life. We were both on full-patch sopor, though we never even thought of buying the good stuff because it’s so expensive, and yeah, it was dangerous to go through town to the palace, but the work was too good to pass up. That was part of his generosity, that he went through the dangerous parts of town so we could have a better life.

You know about why we moved to the palace. It’s on his files. It’s hard to express simultaneously how happy I am to live here and how awful it is that it happened because he was raped. But I can tell you that the very first thing he thought when he woke up was that he’d overslept and that would cost him his job, which meant I wouldn’t get medicine for my eye. It was infected then. He didn’t think about how he’d go hungry or how we’d be back to half-sopor; he thought about me and what I needed, when he was the one who’d just had his fins almost ripped off.

I don’t know how to explain what it’s like to have fresh, strong sopor patches when I never had them before. When I never expected to have them in my life, especially not consistently. Unnecessary luxury, we’d all say, but now I know why warm-bloods always think cold-bloods are lazy: when you don’t even know what a good sleep feels like, it’s hard to be so energetic. I only vaguely knew why fresh food was better than scavenged until I ate fresh consistently. That doesn’t sound like a luxury, I guess, but it is.

Look, I’m not trying to say we’re some kind of martyrs. We’re not. Not at all. What I’m trying to say is, you can’t really explain what it’s like to have nothing to someone who’s never lived it, and to explain how hard it is to not just look out for yourself. That’s why we have gangs, really, I think: to have people we can rely on. Eridan and I had to leave our gang when we moved here, but we still have those connections. If I walked into the cold-blood slums and said I was an estranged Altblood, they would know who I was and who I hung with and, if they didn’t have a problem with Altblood, where to send me. It’s different living in the palace; everything is legal here, and there are doctors you can see without taking your savings to them, and there’s food everywhere – my Gog, the food! The leftovers from banquets are ten times better than what we could afford on our own. Everyone calls our rooms small, but they’re so spacious to me that sometimes I just sit in my personal room, that I have all to myself, and wonder at it. And there’s one for Eridan and one for us to share. It’s decadent. It’s so different from going into the world knowing that everyone thinks you’re a lazy, violent brine-blood who isn’t worth shit. You can report people for saying that here and something will be done.

So, I guess, if you want to know how reliable he is, remember what I told you. We lived the stereotypical seadweller life, hungry and tired and always looking for work, and he made something of himself from that. He looked out for me when it meant giving himself less. He was always kind, always giving. I don’t know anything about strategy except that he soaks up everything in his books like a sponge, but in terms of character and integrity, he’s the best there is.


End file.
